


Hindsight in 2020

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Fireworks, First Kiss, Fluff, M/M, New Year's Eve, i think there's definitely a pining steve in the background here, lots and lots of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-25 14:06:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22193500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: So when Steve says, the day after Christmas, “Hey, wanna get away for a little over New Year’s?”, Danny sort of thinks he’s a genius.After the hustle and bustle of a Christmas with the extended ohana, Steve and Danny spend New Year’s Eve all alone (together).
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 36
Kudos: 275





	Hindsight in 2020

**Author's Note:**

> This is… a little late, seeing as we’re a week and a half into this shiny new decade, but I wrote half of this when I got home around 1:00 AM on January first and another forty percent in the following three or so days, and then it went dormant for a bit before I finally finished it just now, so it’s darn well getting posted, because we’re not even halfway through January and it’s still kinda sorta maybe timely, if you squint. 
> 
> So, I guess HAPPY (not so very) NEW YEAR you wonderful people who read words. I hope your 2020 has by now started off by being kind to you, and if it has not, I will cross my fingers for improvement in the other 356 days. 🤞🎉

Christmas is a joyful, overwhelming, warm, jam-packed affair that involves at least thirty people in Steve’s living room. Chin and Kono bring presents from the mainland, Kamekona and Flippa provide catering, Grace and Will and Nahele all emerge from their various colleges and study books to play tag with Charlie, and Eddie is in the middle of it all, receiving pets and cuddles from everyone and allowing Steve and Danny some room to breathe by usurping attention. It’s more intense than a Williams family Christmas in New Jersey, and that means something.

So when Steve says, the day after Christmas, “Hey, wanna get away for a little over New Year’s?”, Danny sort of thinks he’s a genius. The Christmas dishes are still piled up in the kitchen and even Junior hasn’t worked up the will to free climb those mountains yet, and there’s a tree to be dressed down and lights to be collected from all over the house and Danny’s trying to spend as much time as possible with Grace before she flies out again and Rachel keeps texting him because she wants to get together to talk through how their relationship failed to work out for the third time even though Danny would rather go cliff diving than have that excruciatingly civil conversation, and all around, the days between one holiday and the next have never been this stressful. They have no right to be that bad – he’s not even working, and neither is Steve, and Steve keeps wearing those Christmas socks Danny’s mom sent him even though they’re horrible and nearly caused him to slip on the stairs twice already. It should be fun.

So yes. A little break sounds like an uncharacteristically brilliant idea on Steve’s part.

Danny doesn’t really question any of it until he’s packing his overnight bag. It occurs to him only then that he’s been crashing at Steve’s for a little over a month and they’ve been in each other’s orbit all that time, and now, to get away from the dreariness of daily life and aid in the post-holiday recovery process, they’re paying good money for a hotel room that’s barely fifteen minutes from Steve’s place even while accounting for heavy traffic. They’re all set to spend the night there together, like they haven’t seen enough of each other recently, and Danny doesn’t even mind. He looks at it from every angle – and he knows Steve too well, so there’s a lot of them – and still he can’t feel anything but relief and excitement and affection. He’s looking forward to ending the decade with Steve, and it’s such a strong emotion that it even does the impossible and lessens the sting of Rachel getting Grace and Charlie for that night.

Their accommodations at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, which Steve was in charge of arranging, are suspiciously perfect. Their suite has two bedrooms and a spacious balcony that looks out over both the ocean and the beach and that will provide them an amazing view of the firework show at midnight, and Danny is pretty sure that this kind of room must be booked out months in advance, so he has some questions. 

“I have my ways,” is all Steve says, and then he proceeds to pull what he thinks is his mysterious face, but really just looks remarkably like the expression Charlie wears right before he presents Danny with something small and lopsided that he made and painted with great care during arts and crafts hour at school. It fills Danny with the same tender kind of adoration too, like his heart balloons up and presses against his ribs from the inside and he almost can’t take it, but he will, because there is no way in hell he could ever even contemplate letting this person he loves so dearly down.

They have dinner at the steak and seafood restaurant on the second floor of the building, and Steve orders steak but keeps trying to sneak bites from Danny’s fish. It doesn’t even work, because it’s not the kind of thing you can steal in a hit and run operation by diving in with a fork and withdrawing before anyone notices. Steve has to reach over the table with both hands and saw a little piece off while Danny at first tries to bat his hands away halfheartedly and then gives up and just stares at him flatly. They order two desserts – caramelized cacao nib chocolate ice cream with a chocolate cake for Danny, Tahitian vanilla bean mousse for Steve – and then decide to share them both, so out of revenge for the fish theft, Danny eats probably three quarters of the combined dessert. Steve pretends to complain, but really he’s grinning and eating so slowly he’s practically goading Danny into claiming this victory.

After dinner, they head back up to their room and end up on the balcony in the warm dark of night, shoulder to shoulder at the railing, watching the crowds mill below and the little dancing lights from the boats out on the water. “We need some place to sit,” Steve decides, and Danny agrees, but he doesn’t really expect Steve to go inside and start dragging one of the couches out. There are chairs that are meant to go on the balcony, very okay ones, but when Danny shares this observation politely (“Steve, you idiot, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”) Steve just grunts and tells him to help with the couch or Danny will have to get his own. 

“Who says I even want to share yours?” Danny asks, while he gets into position and starts pulling on the arm closest to the balcony door to facilitate Steve’s pushing at the other end. “Maybe I want my own separate seat, hm?”

Steve just laughs, so Danny lets his mouth run free and points out all of the many and varied flaws in the wiring of Steve’s brain. It just makes Steve laugh harder and get them some beer. 

Their new outdoor couch is a generous two-seater, but it doesn’t take long for Steve to stretch and leave an arm draped along the backrest. Danny doesn’t think he moves closer to Steve intentionally, but he’s also not very surprised when he ends up close enough that Steve’s arm can slip from the back of the couch to around his shoulders with no problem. He has a vague thought that they should probably get down there, get mixed in with all the party people crowding the beach and maybe buy some pretty women drinks. There would never be a better time – nobody wants to be alone for New Year’s. He doesn’t mention it to Steve only because he’s not too sure he wants Steve to say yes.

Their dinner was a late one, and the remaining hours until midnight pass in a blur of Steve’s solid warmth at his side, cold drinks in his hand and soft music spilling out from the radio on the other side of their open balcony doors. They get a few calls from people with early well-wishes for the new beginnings they’re all counting down to – Mary, Chin and Abby and Kono, the many kids they’ve both collected over the years by blood or mentoring or in Five-0 – and each and every one of those calls ends up on speakerphone as a matter of course. Later, Danny couldn’t say for sure whether his own mom dialed his number or Steve’s.

Steve takes out his phone again when it’s still a quarter to, and he starts the countdown way too early. He ends up obnoxiously saying numbers aloud for five whole minutes, starting at three hundred and working his way down slowly, while Danny alternately tells him he’s an idiot for bringing this on himself and eggs him on by saying he can’t stop now and has to finish what he started. 

They get up when Steve hits sixty and by fifty-eight they’re leaning on the balcony railing again to get the best view. At fifteen, people down on the beach start chanting along to Steve’s bright idea in so many voices the numbers are unrecognizably blurred except for the spirit of the thing, and at ten Danny finally joins in. Five and Steve turns to grin at him through the words, four and Danny’s heart jumps in anticipation for what he rationally knows to be a tiny change in a made-up calendar, three and he grabs Steve’s shoulder tight for no other reason than that Steve is there and that’s wonderful. Two, one, and they’re hugging before they even get to zero. At T plus one, all hell breaks loose both down below and in the air as the fireworks start, commemorating the first toe across that fleeting border between old and new.

And Danny knows it’s all fake and deeply meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn’t feel like that in the moment. It feels like the opposite when he and Steve let go of each other but not really, cheating a little by sticking close, maintaining a connection as they watch bright colors bloom across the night sky up above and sometimes at exactly their level, because of how high up they are. “Steve?” he hears himself ask, because he’s a little high, too.

He feels rather than hears Steve hum a happy, “Hmm?”

“Do you ever think about just grabbing me and laying one on me?”

Steve is quiet for a moment. It doesn’t have an air of shock, but one of contemplation, like he’s thinking it over. “Not really.” Left-behind fears start to unfurl their tendrils in Danny’s direction across the imaginary time divide, but Steve takes one of those tactical knives that he likes so much and snips Danny’s anxiety off at the root by the simple act of nudging Danny’s elbow, like he wants him to be in on the joke. “Spent a lot of the past decade thinking about you grabbing and kissing me, though.”

“Huh,” Danny says, and thinks about it too, because they’ve been doing everything together and it doesn’t feel right to let Steve be alone in this. He folds his hand over Steve’s where it rests on the metal bar that separates them from a two hundred feet drop, because that’s something he doesn’t have to think about for even a second, whether it’s one counted out loud before midnight, or a nameless one after.

He finds he doesn’t really need to think about it when he grabs Steve’s shirt, either, or when he reels Steve in and needs to do no work at all for Steve to come along, their kiss complicated by nothing except how they’re both close to giddy laughter for no good reason at all.

As they teeter on the threshold of something new, he can hear the fireworks go off in the distance like a warzone and see their flashes of light even behind his closed eyelids, but he also feels them, right up close, reverberating in his bones, thrumming through his body like the thunder of his own heartbeat. He tastes electricity on Steve’s lips, one in a million, a lightning strike, and that’s the kind of event no mortal can ever hope to predict with any kind of accuracy, but Danny nonetheless finds himself lacking any hint of surprise because _of course_. Of course it would be like that if it’s Steve, if it’s them – what else, if they’re together?

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments are a lovely gift that always puts me in a very festive mood, whether it’s actually still close to the holidays or that’s just fiction. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
